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Ubuntu is composed of many software packages, the vast majority of which are distributed under a free software license. The only exceptions are some proprietary hardware drivers.The main license used is the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) which, along with the GNU Lesser General Public License (GNU LGPL), explicitly declares that users are free to run, copy, distribute, study, change, develop and improve the software. On the other hand, there is also proprietary software available that can run on Ubuntu. Ubuntu focuses on usability, security and stability. The Ubiquity installer allows Ubuntu to be installed to the hard disk from within the Live CD environment, without the need for restarting the computer prior to installation. Ubuntu also emphasizes accessibility and internationalization to reach as many people as possible.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

View3ds, simple viewer for 3D Studio files.

This is simple realtime 3DS file previewer based on the lib3ds library by J.E. Hoffmann. It won't display any 3DS model, but it can properly display 3DS scenes. lib3ds was developed as part of the support libraries for FAMP, the Free Animation and Modeling Project.

The video4linux device is a driver that implements a video pipe using two video4linux devices

Jeroen Vreeken wrote this driver for debugging motion realtime, which worked very nice and he decided to make something usefull of it. You can use this driver for looking at motion in realtime or for feeding a webcam while still securing your room.

Note also that vloopback output can be used by several applications at the same time (see below)

Motion (feeding a second motion process the output of the first gives neat effects)

How to use multiple webcam applications with vloopbac.

1) A simple example (all applications use the same resolution) Do "modproble vloopback" then "resize /dev/video0 /dev/video1 320x240 320x240". Now, you can run as many webcam applications as you want with input as /dev/video2 (however you might have to tell your application the picture size, see below).

Of course, you may think resizing the scale from 320x240 to the same size is silly. Yes, it is, you can edit the source of invert.c (it suffices to remove one sign) to write a program that simply sends the stream from /dev/video0 to /dev/video1 if you prefer.

2) A more complicated example (applications using different resolutions) Do "modprobe vloopback pipes=2". Then "resize /dev/video0 /dev/video1 640x480 640x480 & resize /dev/video2 /dev/video3 640x480 320x240". (Assuming that you have only one real video device at /dev/video0. You can check with dmesg).

Now, you can watch your webcam with camstream at 640x480 (choose the device called vloopback0 output in camstream's menu, which is /dev/video2), at the sime time you can record a video of your webcam stream at 320x240 by doing "ffmpeg -vd /dev/video4 -s 320x240 picture.mpeg", you can at the same time run a webcam http server by running "camsource" (after editting camsource.conf to choose /dev/video2 or /dev/video4 as v4l_input source).

N.B. You can't use camorama with vloopback, as far as I know, camorama looks for inputs from /dev/video0. You should also not open two "view"s in the same instance of camstream. However, opening multiple instances of camsource doesn't cause a problem.

vloopback-1.0.tar.gz : old stable version with some more fixes and allow build a kernel module in debian way and fixes problems to compile in Suse. If you want to make it work with motion , use motion-3.2.6 or above. stable for kernel <= 2.6.17

Kernel 2.4

vloopback-0.92-snap1.tar.gz: Snaphot release for testing (this is the last version ever to be released for kernel 2.4 and is the 0.91 version with a redhat kernel 2.4.20 fix)